Comparing Windows Vista Home Premium to Business edition

Comparing Windows Vista Home Premium to Business edition

Introduction

Windows Vista comes in 6 editions, 4 are available for public retail, 2 are only available to a limited set of people, The enterprise edition is only distributed to companies who buy Volume License agreements, Starter edition is available only in countries with low average income, For the rest of us there are 4 editions.

Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, And Ultimate, with home Basic closest to starter (down the list) and business closest to Enterprise, And ultimate having every feature in every edition and a bit more.

On this page, i will only compare Home Premium to Business edition, Since i can exclude Ultimate, simply because it has everything in every edition (including all features in enterprise), and i can exclude Home Basic because it does not have much as substance for the comparison anyway.

If you are interested in a table comparing all editions, Check out the Vista Edition Comparison Page

Surely you know (from the name) that Home Premium is for the home user and focused around Entertainment, And business is for business and focuses on Security, Reliability, Remote Desktop, Etc... Yet Business does have some applications for the home User, and Home premium can be used for business, So which one

From the comparison i will do here, You should be able to see if you need this, or that, if you need this AND that, you will have to buy the Ultimate edition

When i first tested Beta 2, there was a feature to upgrade between editions, When Vista final came out, I installed the Ultimate edition, so the file WindowsUpgradeAnytime.exe was not there (but i assume this is because i have the ultimate edition)

So, let us start.

Features in Home Premium Edition (And not in business edition)

Themed slide shows

Native DVD playback: You no longer need PowerDVD to run your DVD videos, Even BlueRay disks are supported, Among the features is Quality Degradation according to the documentation microsoft made available to hardware manufacturers, You are literally paying to have the media on your system degraded so to protect Premium Content, But in short, You can watch them without additional software.

Windows Media Center: If you have a TV card, maybe you used WinDVR to record your favorite TV shows to your computer, or even to watch those shows, Now windows media center can efficiently substitute that software. You will miss Video Desktop though, But media center does not only provide that, Online entertainment, Music, Photo fun, and other video capabilities are also part of the package, If you have XBOX, one with MediaCenter extensions you will love the idea of your entertainment over your network, Making your XBOX more useful.

If you live in the United states, You can hook up your Cable since it will ship with cablecard support, And if you live in the US or North Korea You can also get it to run High Definition TV !

Windows Movie Maker HD: Composing High Definition video, then there is also DVD Authoring, and DVD burning, NERO will always be remembered

Features in Business edition (And not in home premium edition)

Complete PC Backup and Restore (image based) :

Shadow Copy (restore previous versions of your documents): This is a nice feature, When windows boots up, it creates a shadow copy of your hard disk (Yes, every time you boot up), So when you regret changing something in a file, or when a file goes corrupt, You can restore a version of the file stored at a certain boot up time ! All you need to do is open the properties dialog for a file, Folder, or even a complete volume (Drive D for example), and you will find the tab to do this right there, telling you when those versions of the file were created

Two processors (two processor sockets) support: Although should ship with Home Premium (will motivate game manufacturers to add dual processor compatibility to there games making them faster and better), This feature is available in Business, Enterprise and Premium. If Dual core is lively, imagine woodcrest !

*Note, i am out for a little break, I will finish the document as soon as i am back*

Small Business Resources

Windows Fax and Scan:

Wireless network provisioning:

Windows Mobility Center:

Offline Folder support:

System image–based backup and recovery:  

Encrypting File System:

Desktop deployment tools for managed networks:

Policy-based quality of service for networking

Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) Client:

Control over installation of device drivers:

Network Access Protection Client Agent: